On the degree of standard geometric predicates for line transversals in 3D

Abstract

In this paper we study various geometric predicates for determining the existence of and categorizing the configurations of lines in 3D that are transversal to lines or segments. We compute the degrees of standard procedures of evaluating these predicates. The degrees of some of these procedures are surprisingly high (up to 168), which may explain why computing line transversals with finite-precision floating-point arithmetic is prone to error. Our results suggest the need to explore alternatives to the standard methods of computing these quantities.